Legendary UFC fighter Mark Kerr’s toughest battles happened both inside and outside the ring.
The mixed martial arts pioneer is well-known for his impressive and dominant exploits during brutal professional fights. But there is so much more to his career and personal life than what was covered in HBO’s 2002 documentary, so director/writer Benny Safdie and star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson teamed up to tell his full story in sports biopic The Smashing Machine.
“The documentary was something that I really loved, but there were certain parts of it that, just by nature of access, you can’t really see behind certain doors,” Safdie tells Entertainment Weekly. “You don’t necessarily get the full story just based on what’s real and what’s there. With the movie, what I realized is, you can put people in the rooms that they didn’t have access to. You can put characters in places where they weren’t to let people understand it better.”
Starring Johnson as Kerr, The Smashing Machine chronicles the rise and peak of his UFC career from 1997-2000, chronicling his fights, his struggles with addiction to painkillers, and roller coaster relationship with Dawn Staples (played by his Jungle Cruise costar Emily Blunt), his then-girlfriend who later became his wife (they now share a son but are no longer together).
“At one time, he was the greatest, most dominant fighter in that window of time on the planet,” Johnson tells EW. “Very rare for people to relate to that, but you can relate to a relationship that’s fraught with love, that’s painful, that’s toxic, that is codependent, and then addiction, and failing, and getting knocked down, and just trying. Benny is obsessed with this idea of trying, that you don’t have to win at everything, but just try, and that’s Mark and Dawn, as you’ll see in the film. It’s a love story — the backdrop just happens to be he’s this great fighter.”
Eric Zachanowich
Safdie reveals that he, Johnson, and Blunt “got very close” with Kerr throughout the making of this biopic. “And Emily would talk with Dawn,” the director adds. “Because we realized that these people are alive, and this is their story. We really wanted to do right by what things felt like, not necessarily exactly what happened.”
That’s why Kerr and Staples (and their son) were their most anticipated audience members when they finally finished the movie and were able to screen it for them.
“It was all surreal for them,” Johnson says of the movie’s subjects. “But they were absolutely blown away. It was so gratifying for us to show them.”
“Those were the screenings we were really waiting for,” Safdie adds. “We wanted to know if we got it for them. So when they had those reactions of truthfulness and maybe a little bit of healing, that meant a lot to us. It was really important.”
It was also the culmination of a long journey to making this movie a reality. Johnson first approached Safdie about making a biopic of Kerr six years ago after seeing the HBO documentary.
“Since that time, it burrowed into my brain, and the character of Mark Kerr was just something that I could never stop thinking about,” Safdie says. “I had these pictures of him in my phone. He was such an amazing contradiction of things, so powerful and strong in the ring, and yet, out of the ring, he was so soft-spoken, polite, and willing to try and talk about what he was feeling and his emotions. I knew right away that DJ saw the same things in Mark that I saw, that somebody’s physical strength can maybe impede on your ability to empathize with them, when really they’re just like everybody else. You’d think that they’d be invincible, but that’s not the case. It was something that I knew we had to do.”
But as the years passed due to COVID and other scheduling delays, it seemed as if they would never get to make their dream a reality. Safdie, however, never forgot about it. So when he found a vintage ’90s yellow Nautica sweater that Kerr wore in real life — in a size that actually fit Johnson, no less — the filmmaker sent it along with a thoughtful handwritten letter to the actor to keep the dream alive. Unfortunately, his gift got lost in the mail.
“I never got it!” Johnson reveals with a laugh. “Someone’s going to find the note someday, somewhere, being auctioned off. He sent it with this beautiful note about, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen with this project, but I wish you well with this, and I hope it’s me [who directs it], but here, take this [sweater].’ And I never got it. But that is one of the many, many things that makes this entire journey so kismet and had to happen, because this film changed our lives.”
Safdie laughs as he agrees. “Everything happens for a reason,” the director says. “When we finally sat down and said, ‘Let’s do this thing,’ we both were in the perfect place to really understand Mark better. We made the movie when it had to be made and how it had to be made.”
Eric Zachanowich
For Johnson, finally getting to bring Kerr’s story to life marks a new chapter in his own career, taking on more vulnerable, raw, and real roles.
“I have been waiting for this opportunity to challenge myself in ways that I’d not been challenged before, to really just rip myself open as an actor,” Johnson says. “What I was able to connect with in Mark is when you want something so badly and you’ll do anything to get it, but the thing you want so badly just doesn’t happen. That happened for me: I thought I was going to be a professional football player, going to the NFL.”
Johnson always viewed a career in football as his “ticket out” of living with his parents as an adult, so losing that was devastating (he ultimately, of course, went on to become a WWE champion before pivoting to acting).
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“That was going to be the thing that was going to allow me to buy my parents their first home, since we lived in trailer parks and apartments,” he adds. “When it comes to that kind of stuff, you get one shot, and that never happened for me. I had to move back in with my parents at 22 or 23, and I was just spiraling at that time.”
Pulling from that trauma to explore Kerr’s own emotional journey was ultimately “very cathartic” for Johnson.
“I finally had a place to put all this, because I’m not really a therapy kind of guy,” he adds. “And so you also have to have somebody who you trust in these scenes, and there was no one I trust more than Emily. We all dove in, and the experience changed my life.”
The Smashing Machine premieres in theaters Oct. 3. Check out EW’s exclusive sneak peek photos above.
